


Layers of Memory

by Mirradin



Category: X-Men (Movieverse), X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) - Fandom
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-28
Updated: 2014-06-28
Packaged: 2018-02-06 14:21:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 820
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1861200
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mirradin/pseuds/Mirradin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bishop remembers every time they never died.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Layers of Memory

The first time it happens, it seems almost too easy: He lies down, Shadowcat drops to her knees behind him and cups her hands aroud his head, pain _blazes_ –

Bishop is standing in the kitchen. Late-afternoon sun is spilling through the grimy window, and the coffee maker on the counter is half empty. The radio in the next room is turned up loud, the announcer’s voice clear over a cloud of static.

“-coffee?” Sunspot’s voice breaks through the tail of Blink’s death cries ringing in Bishop’s ears.

“No.” Bishop’s voice sounds rough, strange to his own ears. “The Sentinels are coming. We need to leave.”

Sunspot stares at him. The heat gathering around the finger he’d reached out to the coffee maker wavers and dissipates. Then his shoulders tighten and he sucks in a breath. “Right.”

Bishop closes his eyes –

The air is sticky and intimately warm, nothing like the dry sear of an Arizona summer. The space around him is dense with trees, a vivid green that looks out of place. Wooden crates are piled against the nearest trunks, held in place with camouflage netting.

“Bishop?” someone asks. Bishop turs around to find Warpath there, with a barrel tucked under his arm and a concerned expression, and his torso intact.

And Bishop saw him die, saw him blasted in half, not even five minutes ago. He was on the roof, watching the sky. The Sentinel put a hole through his torso before it even landed.

He’ll have to tell Blink to stay with the boy, in future. She went straight up as soon as she heard him anyway, so they might as well use that to get him _away_ for the few seconds of good it might do.

“It worked,” he says, more to himself than to Warpath.

Warpath frowns at him, tilting his head. “You – remember?”

“I remember,” Bishop says, in a tone that does not invite discussion. Warpath burned; Sunspot was impaled; Iceman was crushed before he even made it all the way to ice, and he is the only one, except perhaps Shadowcat, who will know.

He is no stranger to horror. Bishop has seen men and women die before – good people, subordinates, friends. He has never once had the blessing of seeing one of those people alive and unharmed, afterwards.

***

It is not much of a blessing.

***

_Forty-three._

This is how many times Bishop runs with Shadowcat’s hand on his arm, hearing the rest of them fight and die behind them.

  _Seventeen._

This is how many times Bishop sees one of them die.

  _Eleven._

This is how many times a Sentinel almost prevents the two of them from making it into the bolt-room, before another of the team leaps in to get it away from them for those crucial few seconds.

_Nine._

This is how many times someone else snaps upright, face tight with fear or despair, and says, “They’ve found us. We have to go.”

***

Bishop is not grateful for those nine times.

As their leader, he has responsibilities. One of those is that there are tasks only he should carry out. There are burdens only he should bear, and the burden of memory is the heaviest he can ever recall carrying. They say you never know a man until death is near: Well, Bishop has heard his team look death in the face forty-three times, and though their voices were choked with fear and desperation, they have never been anything other then fiercely, terrifyingly loyal.

They have never been anything other than some of the fiest people he has ever known, and they have never done anything other than die.

Bishop can see that weight ( _twice)_ bowing Sunspot’s shoulders down, can see it sinking ( _once_ ) in Colossus’s thousand-yard stare and coiling ( _thrice_ ) in Blink’s restless fingers as she carves another stick down to nothing, and if he could have one wish it would be to bear it for them. 

*** 

The last time it happens is, if anything, harder than the first. _Practice makes perfect_ , but this practice comes with another layer of screams and hopeless bravery every time, and if it weren’t for duty and exhaustion Bishop would never sleep. He has heard them die too often.

But: For the cost of another layer of memory, these bright, defiant people will be alive tomorrow.

In Bishop’s ledger, that’s not a price worth noticing.

***

The very last time it happens, Bishop takes the time to look at each and all of them – to dedicate himself to their faces, and not to dwell on their deaths.

If it works, they will never have died anyway; not here, where they will likely fall, and not in the forty-three times that only he remembers.

He may not know them, in the timeline they hope to create – but, like another layer of memory, that is a price worth paying.

The doors swing shut, and Bishop takes his post.


End file.
